Our 2017 Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, interviewed with Lakshmi Gandhi of NBC News Asian America! This beautiful interview gives readers an insight into how her collection “Shahr-e- jaanaan: The City of The Beloved,” came to be.

Gandhi writes, "'I was in my early twenties when I began writing the collection, and I was searching for love,' Talukder said. 'But I didn’t want to write about the poems as myself, so I kind of hide behind these legendary Persian characters like Laila and Majnu and Shireen and Farhad who found their way into South Asian poetry. A lot of [my poems] were me making sense of what I felt through the lenses of these stories.'"